My Vista machine can only get Local Access on wireless and wired networks at work -- urgent!

I have a Vista laptop that is normally at home, and works perfectly fine there on my wireless network. I'm getting ready to travel today, and will need to work on this laptop. I brought it to work to install the VPN software and I cannot get it to connect to the Internet here. I've tried to connect to the wireless network and plug it in directly to the wired network, but to no avail. No matter what, I get "Local Access Only."

On your wired and/or wireless networks at your work, are you going through any firewalls or other devices?

If so that may be the issue. But since you'll actually be using this on the road, can you go to a local hotspot where you could hook up wirelessly and check to see if your VPN works. if so, you would be good to go and you could troubleshoot the inside the office issue later. The Satellite card probably works because it totally bypasses any internal things that are in play.

I will say that I was involved in another EE question a few months ago with something similar and I think that it turned out just to be some Vista problem that only appeared when the asker was inside his network ... which I know makes no sense... I don't remember what he did to finally solve that issue.

Thanks for the input, jhyiesla. The wireless network here is actually like a hot spot -- that is, it is a Comcast connection connected to a linksys router. It is completely isolated from our corporate network.

There is another unsecured wireless network from another company on our floor though -- I might as well check that, too. Hadn't thought of that.

Well, I tried to connect to the other unsecured wireless network, and again, I get local access only.

I am going to try to install the VPN through the (slow) satellite card. But at least it is something. I'd still love other ideas as my work is going to be horribly painful if I'm stuck on the satellite card.

Sigh -- I just had to reboot and now all of a sudden it connected to the second wireless network with no problems. It was also very slow (8 KB/sec download!). But it connected. So I tried again to connect to our wireless network, and again it is local access only.

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First of all, thanks for posting those answers. I haven't checked them out, yet, but as you suspected might happen, I got to my location and tried to connect to the weless network there, and it was perfect, first try, no problems.

Anyway, I'll look at the answers when I have this laptop back in the office, and select the best you've offered so far for the points. I wanted to thank you and let you know I'm all set for now (since it happened to work here).

Glad to hear that your basic issue got addressed. I've seen several issue that appear to be Vista specific and sometimes the answers are found in somewhat obtuse places. I'm not sure that MS did us all a favor by pretty much totally redesigning the GUI. Let me know if you are able to solve the secondary issue or not when you return.

Whoops -- I'm sorry it has taken me so long to get back to this. I just haven't had a need to bring my laptop back into work to continue testing, as was my plan. But in the meantime, I accepted jhyiesla's answer since it was definitely helpful. I'm sorry to keep you waiting this long, jhyiesla!

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